WHITE PAPER HYBRID CLOUD: FLEXIBLE, SCALABLE, AND COST-EFFICIENT UK: US: HK:

Transcription

1 WHITE PAPER HYBRID CLOUD: FLEXIBLE, SCALABLE, AND COST-EFFICIENT UK: US: HK:

2 CONTENTS 03 Executive Summary 07 Counting the Cost of Utilizing Big Data 04 The Elasticity and Scalability of Hybrid Cloud 08 Increasing Options with a Hybrid Infrastructure 05 Cost Savings of Cloud 06 Hybrid Cloud and Big Data Processing

3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Cloud computing brings elasticity to businesses, enabling them to mitigate variability in demand, regardless of whether that service is delivered to internal or external clients. However, there are different types of cloud computing consumption models. Private cloud comes in varying forms and provides a limited level of flexibility, depending on whether the cloud is hosted on an organization s own servers or externally in a data center, where it may be possible to increase storage and computing power when needed. The public cloud environment is broader and has the ability to scale more quickly, giving you the option to keep only essential services on your private cloud and move everything else to the public cloud, with the capacity to expand when necessary. A hybrid cloud environment gives you the power of both private and public platforms; this thought leadership discussion document looks at some of the benefits this potent combination can bring to a business. 03

4 THE ELASTICITY AND SCALABILITY OF HYBRID CLOUD The beauty of hybrid cloud is that companies can easily and cost-effectively extend their IT capabilities. A cloud platform can manage current business needs and support future growth. By integrating with an existing infrastructure, organizations can provide new capabilities to their end users while reducing costs. For companies that are growing, it can be expensive to scale an on-premises infrastructure; they would need to be highly accurate in their growth projections to make it cost-effective. Hybrid cloud implementations give you unlimited resources on-demand. The flexibility and scalability of public cloud eliminates the need for capital expenditure to accommodate a short-term increase in demand; with public cloud an organization only pays for the resources it consumes. PUBLIC PRIVATE HYBRID TRADITIONAL IT With nearly every business experiencing occasional peaks and troughs, the challenge to mitigate this variability becomes easier with a flexible IT infrastructure. Cloud scalability enables organizations to respond quickly to high demand without the need for up-front investment and then scale down again when things go quiet. 04

5 COST SAVINGS OF CLOUD A recent study by IDG Research revealed that 24% of executives reduced their IT costs as a direct result of hybrid cloud. And 83% of IT leaders either use a form of hybrid cloud or plan to do so in the future. According to Milind Govekar, Managing Vice President at Gartner: Hybrid cloud computing can maximize costefficiency, particularly capital expenditure, through competition and automated arbitrage. Many organizations have missed opportunities to reduce cost and improve cloud ROI through implementing cost management and optimization strategies such as shutting down unused workloads or selecting lower-cost cloud or regions. 26% of respondents mentioned cloud cost management as a significant challenge according to RightScale s State of the Cloud Survey Cost savings can also be made using cheap cloud storage, data and application segmentation, taking advantage of the elasticity of the infrastructure. Other gains can come from operations and maintenance. Fewer on-premises servers mean reduced energy consumption from powering and cooling the servers. And less on-premises hardware to maintain leads to more effective use of human resources. 05

6 HYBRID CLOUD AND BIG DATA PROCESSING Hybrid cloud is often linked with the term big data. As companies increasingly need to process large amounts of data, hybrid cloud gives them the scalability they need to tackle this volume of information. Cloud platforms facilitate big data technologies that allow companies to analyze and utilize data effectively. An organization can use hybrid cloud storage to hold accumulated business data and run analytical queries in the public cloud; they can scale this to support current and future demand. Big data comes in different shapes and sizes and can describe any voluminous amount of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data that has the potential to be analyzed for information. Analysts will usually look at structured data such as revenue and number of sales, generally the type of data you include in a database. Semi-structured data has some structure to it but not in the form of tables in a database; it can include EDI formats and XML. Unstructured data is the largest group and accounts for 80% of all data and can cover images, audio, documents, messages, and tweets. 06

7 COUNTING THE COST OF UTILIZING BIG DATA The increasing amount of data can cause problems for organizations, especially if they have vast quantities of unstructured data such as documents and images. In-house storage capacity can soon be overwhelmed and it becomes necessary to find alternative strategies. Moving to a cloud solution is the most straightforward way of immediately increasing your storage and giving you easy access to all the space you need. When it comes to cost-effectiveness, the economies of scale offered by public cloud oftentimes outweigh the advantages of expanding private cloud storage. If necessary, organizations can still store their most sensitive data in private storage while everything else goes into the public cloud. The pay-per-use billing model of the cloud is the key driver of cost savings when it comes to big data. 07

8 INCREASING OPTIONS WITH A HYBRID INFRASTRUCTURE For many organizations, flexibility is the driving factor behind their decision to move to hybrid cloud. In every business vertical, companies are aware of cloud technology and are making strides to implement it. Many of these businesses are not giving up their on-premises IT; they re deploying a mixed infrastructure. Mission critical and security-intensive applications are still hosted on-premises, private cloud is used for virtualizing some of these on-premises applications while public cloud is used for non-mission critical applications like Office applications, document management, application testing and development, and data storage and archiving. The elasticity of hybrid clouds allows businesses to easily supplement their in-house computing power at peak times by outsourcing tasks to the public cloud. With the capacity to offload more data onto the public cloud or to keep it in a private cloud, the majority of organizations are now looking to move to a hybrid environment in the near future. Hybrid is the end-state. A lot of people say the end state is cloud. I don t buy that at all... It is about creating the right architecture to support the application and the evolution of the application over time. - James Staten, VP & Principle Analyst Forrester Research 08

9 A next generation MSP, Datapipe is recognized as the pioneer of managed services for public cloud platforms. Datapipe has unique expertise in architecting, migrating, managing and securing public cloud, private cloud, hybrid IT and traditional IT. The world s most trusted brands partner with Datapipe to optimize mission-critical and day-to-day enterprise IT operations, enabling them to transform, innovate, and scale. Backed by a global team of experienced professionals and world-class interconnected data centers, Datapipe provides comprehensive cloud, compliance, security, governance, automation and DevOps solutions. Gartner named Datapipe a leader in the Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting. DATAPIPE.COM UK: US: HK: Datapipe